Culture September 2014

It is not frequent that a few seconds of music summarize the features of a whole album: nevertheless, after having listened at Vieux Farka Touré’s Mon Pays, that appears to be exactly the case of the brief opening instrumental solo of the first track, Diack So. Indeed, since the first notes, the Mali-born guitarist and…

In southern Ethiopia, among the Sidamo and other ethnic groups, wasa is the staple food-crop. It is a dark flour, obtained from a bulb plant called ‘wese’, or in the national language ‘ensete muse’, popularly known as ‘false banana’. The ‘ensete muse’ requires a portion of a rhizome to reproduce. The most common way to…

Definitely, Medea Benjamin is not afraid to tackle controversial themes: on the contrary, it seems she considers being silent on some issues the deadliest possible sin. She has dealt, in her previous books (some of which date back to the late 80’s) with the embargo imposed on Cuba and the stories of Latin American women,…

‘Sapana’ is a celebration undertaken by young men, around 20 years of age, to become recognized as adult men. Only after the rite, will they be considered as adults meaning that they will be allowed to sit at the meetings with the elders, ‘kokwö’, and participate in sacrifices, ‘kirket’. We look at the rite of…